"The richness of present-moment experience is the richness of life itself. Too often we let our thinking and our beliefs about what we “know” prevent us from seeing things as they really are. We tend to take the ordinary for granted and fail to grasp the extraordinariness of the ordinary"…Jon Kabbat-Zinn

Life is made of many moments, and if we miss the moments, we lose much of the richness in our lives. When I first learned to draw it took a long time to learn to unsee. My ideas of what a body looked like, a house looked like, and a tree looked like got in the way of seeing what was really there. I had to unlearn seeing.

To see with a beginners mind, is to see as if for the first time. When I began to do this, my drawings begin to reflect what was in front of me rather than the very flat and stereotyped representations that lived in my mind.

Compassion! Who needs compassion? Why on earth would I want to do a course about compassion? This is a good question and is we begin the Living Mindfully With Compassion course by asking, "What reasons can you come up with for ​not​ participating in compassion training?"

How many times have you made a New Year resolution not to keep it? How often do you think about something you’d like to change and you don't change it or do and you don’t do it? How many times have you resolved to begin or maintain a regular meditation practice and not done it? Perhaps now is the time to book an MBSR course. This 8-week course allows you to start, get hesitant and start again. It offers the time, structure, teacher and group support needed to begin to develop a habit.One of the writers I love who speaks about making the changes you want to make is a sassy presenter, Kelly Mc Gonnigal. She’s practical, funny, full of ideas and very entertaining. She’s good to watch and good to read.

She has a useful book called ,”The willpower instinct”. She dispenses with words like procrastination and speaks about “willpower challenges”. Try this on! Say to yourself, “I’m a chronic procrastinator” and feel into the impact on you. Now say, “I’m facing a willpower challenge”. Which is the more empowering. For me, it feels like there is definitely more possibility of dealing with a will power challenge.

In 2018, I wrote a 5 week willpower course based on her work for procrastinating university students . The course combined her tips with procrastination, heaps of entertaining research antidotes, bits of procrastination brain science and a weekly short mindfulness practice.

When you come to a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course, you learn many mindfulness practices that build on each other.

We begin with body practices (body scan, yoga and walking). What we learn in the body practices informs our breathing practice, and from there we move to an open awareness practice.

​It is important to experience all of these practices, to learn what they offer and to emerge from the course with a capacity to work wisely, choosing and mixing the different meditation practices to best "meet yourself at the moment". The meditation jargon calls this, "working with skilful means'.

Author

Tienne Simons is a therapist and the founder of HeadRest Mindfulness training. She did her training in MBSR when she became convinced that the program was not only a useful add on to therapy for many but sometimes a more appropriate way to support people than counselling. She has had a mindfulness practice for about 30 years- well nearly!